


Houses of the Holy

by orphan_account



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fight Club - Freeform, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, INSIDER pov !!!, M/M, Post-Series, Suicidal Thoughts, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:48:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25696786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "Ms. Foster," the letter says. "Will's birthday is fast approaching. I understand you are in possession of his most favorite dog, Winston. If you would be so kind as to bring him to Kenya, I would be forever in your debt. I have of course made all the necessary arrangements. Signed, Dr. Hannibal Lecter."
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 22
Kudos: 406





	Houses of the Holy

_Ms. Foster,_ the letter says. _Will's birthday is fast approaching. I understand you are in possession of his most favorite dog, Winston. If you would be so kind as to bring him to Kenya, I would be forever in your debt. I have of course made all the necessary arrangements. Signed, Dr. Hannibal Lecter._

Molly considers calling Jack Crawford for about three seconds. He's an exhausting man, the FBI is an exhausting organization, and she's really not feeling up to the hassle of an international manhunt. Besides, Wally's staying with his grandparents for the summer, and she can get her neighbor to look after the shop. It might be good for her to take a vacation on her own for a change. Unwind. Decompress.

Kenya. Molly's always wanted to see a lion in the wild. The opportunity to see how her ex-husband is doing in his new life as Hannibal the Cannibal's murderous concubine is really just the icing on the cake.

***

In the two years since his disappearance, Molly has never stopped loving Will. She loves him in a different sort of way, now, like people love those they've lost, those they can access only in memory, but she still feels a fierce swell of protectiveness every time she sees that piece of shit Freddie Lounds' tell-all book on the racks at airports, grocery stores, in the front window of Barnes & Noble. There are only a few people in the world who have the right to Will Graham, and after everything, she still feels like one of them.

She understands, logically, that the man she's going to meet is not the same Will she was married to, or even the same Will who sat at her bedside in the hospital, after Dolarhyde. But she doesn't quite understand just how different he's going to be until she gets out of the car in the dirt drive in front of a bungalow an hour outside Nairobi and sees him standing on the screened-in porch, tan, holding a cup of coffee, easy with himself in a way she's never seen. From a distance, she hardly recognizes him, and for a second she thinks maybe she's gotten the wrong house--nevermind that Hannibal arranged every second of her trip, that a severe, silent woman named Chiyoh drove her here herself.

Then Will calls, incredulous, "Molly?" and she knows this is the place. His voice is exactly the same.

The flimsy screen door slaps open, and then Will's coming toward her, and before she can even say _Hey, long time no see,_ Winston's out of the car like a shot. He collides with Will's legs, and Will spends a few seconds staring down at him dumbly, like what's happening is so far outside the realm of reality that he can't process it, before he falls to his knees and says, "Hey, buddy. What are you doing here?"

Molly fights back a helpless swell of affection. "I'm pretty sure he's your birthday present."

Will looks up at her with a crease between his eyebrows. She can see him starting to ask _How,_ but then Chiyoh gets out of the car, and it changes to a fond, "Hannibal."

It's a bit of a shock to hear him say Dr. Lecter's name like that, after so many years of hate and bitterness. But looking back on it, Molly supposes there had always been a little too much Hannibal Lecter in their marriage: in the silences, the things Will wouldn't talk about, the parts of his life that he wasn't willing to share with her. There have always been pieces of him she was completely incapable of touching, and she supposes, listening to how he says _Hannibal_ , seeing how he looks now--those pieces belonged to someone else.

"Yeah," she says, kind of wistfully. "Hannibal."

Will smiles as Winston licks his chin, then straightens, one hand still on the dog's head. "Come on. You've had a long trip. I'll get you a cup of coffee."

***

Molly's not sure why she isn't afraid to die, except that she told her neighbor if she wasn't back in a week that she should call Jack Crawford and give him Hannibal's letter. She's sure Hannibal's smart enough to predict she'd do something like that, considering he already tried to have her killed once, and if he wanted Crawford knocking at his door there were a lot of easier ways to get him here.

Plus, Will's here. He might be a lot of things she never expected when she married him, but she knows he's not going to hurt her, or let anyone else hurt her. Not even Hannibal Lecter.

"You cut your hair," is the first thing he says, once they both have their fresh coffees.

Molly runs her fingers through it. It's a bit shorter than shoulder-length, now, and dyed a lighter blonde than it was the last time she saw him, in that hospital. "That's textbook, right? Step one of any significant female mental breakdown. Chop off all your hair."

"Well, I like it." He scratches behind Winston's ears, polite smile fading. "I'm sorry, for everything--"

"You warned me," Molly interrupts. She doesn't want to do the song and dance of worrying over old wounds. She healed a long time ago, and Will's not her responsibility any more. "Look, Will, I don't blame you. I'm not holding a grudge. It would be kind of useless to hold a grudge against one of the FBI's Most Wanted. I don't think that I'll ever understand why you did what you did, either, but I don't think I'm supposed to."

He's quiet for a minute. There's a wedding ring on his finger. Theirs were silver. This one is gold. Molly noticed it a while ago but she's been trying not to think about it too hard.

"The night he killed Abigail Hobbs," Will says eventually, "I called to warn him Jack was coming. And then, the first week we were here, he got malaria. He was delirious, he had a hundred and five degree fever. He held a knife to his own throat, and put it in my hand, and told me that some people think it's important to die in holy places, but for his part, he thought it was more important to die by holy hands."

"You're not a priest, Will," Molly manages.

He smiles. "I told him the same thing." He slips off his wedding ring and hands it to her. "See the inscription?"

Molly does. It says: _You are, to me, the most holy._

She hands the ring back, watches him slip it on, how he does it without looking. It hurts, to see someone else's claim where hers used to be, but not as much as she expected it to. It hurts a lot less than it does to think about Wally's father. "I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me," she admits.

"Nothing," Will says. "Nothing. Just that I didn't choose him, like I chose you. It was never a choice. Even when I wanted to forget about him, I couldn't. It didn't matter that I knew what he was."

_What are you?_ Molly's about to ask. _Are you the same as him, now?_

But then battered Jeep rumbles up the drive in a cloud of dust, and Hannibal Lecter gets out.

***

Dr. Lecter-- _please, call me Hannibal_ \--is unfailingly polite.

Molly hesitates to use the words "domestic goddess" even inside the safety of her own head, but there's really no other fitting term for how Hannibal glides through the kitchen, the dining room, with perfect grace. He's subtly different from what she's seen of him in his televised trial and the glossy black and white photos at the center of Freddie Lounds' book, in light-colored linens and leather sabahs instead of his trademark three-piece suit, none of the usual product in his hair. Her first inclination is to write it off as a side-effect of the heat and the continent, but it seems deeper than that, almost as if he's shed a layer of himself. It might be the jetlag, but a few times, she catches a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye, and for a moment before she turns to look fully at him, she could swear he's not quite a person.

Will's actual birthday isn't for another couple of days, but Hannibal still produces an impressive spread, which he promises her with an amused smile contains no people. While they eat Molly wonders if he knows about how Will grew up poor, how there was never enough food on the table and how his dad never had enough cash to splurge on a birthday cake--she wonders if Hannibal produced all this food with the same fragile, protective feeling in his chest as when she learned to bake, and then, watching how he makes sure Will's wineglass is never empty, how he gracefully coaxes Will into taking a second helping, a third, thinks that Hannibal probably knows much more about all that than she ever did. The thought doesn't sting.

Will seems healthy. Happy. During their marriage she never particularly felt he was _un_ happy, but she supposes now that she didn't have any good points of comparison. There had been moments when she'd catch him staring off into space, looking haunted, moments when she'd wake up in the middle of the night and find the bed cold and empty next to her, and maybe she'd ignored those little signs because she hadn't really known how to reach him when he was like that. Somehow she doubts there's any of that here.

She can't help but notice how much Hannibal touches Will. Casual touches--a brush of fingers, a hand on Will's knee that she's probably not supposed to be aware of--and more intimate ones--a familiar kiss pressed to his forehead on his way to go retrieve another bottle of wine from the cellar, a thumb sweeping under Will's eye to dash away a stray eyelash. It's something she noticed when she was married to him: how Will was almost starved for touch, ravenous in the bedroom, always tangling himself with her in sleep and coming up behind her at the stove to plaster himself to her back. He was skittish with her. She always had to let him initiate contact. But this Will, this healthy, happy Will, doesn't even seem to notice what Hannibal's doing.

Molly thinks she's glad. It's a strange sort of gladness, mired in a dozen different layers of complication, but she knows what Will's been through, she knows how he used to suffer, and if this is his version of a happy ending, she's glad he gets to have it.

It's a pleasant dinner, all things considered. She and Hannibal make small talk about the house, careful to avoid mention of Dolarhyde or near-death experiences or how he almost got her son killed. It was built by British colonists, he says. Technically they also own 3000 acres of the surrounding land, but they leave it to the use of animals in the overlapping preserve. She asks about the art on the walls. He tells her he acquired it at a gallery in the city; it's all by local artists. She asks about the stainless steel appliances in the kitchen. He tells her he had it renovated when he first bought the house, back in the late nineties. She asks about the utilities; he smiles ruefully and admits they have to have propane and water delivered on a bi-monthly basis, and they comiserate over the tiny inconveniences of living off the grid until suddenly it's almost midnight and she thinks if she has to stay awake for another second it might kill her.

"I expect to see a lion tomorrow," she informs them, as Chiyoh slings a rifle over her shoulder and pulls open the screen door. "No offense, Will, but I'm only here for the lions."

***

Once Chiyoh has escorted Ms. Foster out to the guest house, Hannibal finds Will in their bedroom. He stands in the doorway for a moment, admiring the classical lines of his husband's shoulders, his back, as he undresses for bed. To see Will's naked skin will never cease to thrill him. To see it like this, while Will's ex-wife sleeps only a few hundred feet away, and to know that it is only for him, makes something primal and possessive rear its head in Hannibal's chest. This man is _his_ , and only his.

He goes to Will, slips his arms around his waist, and feels a swell of contentment when Will leans his weight back against him. "I trust you enjoyed your birthday present?"

Will looks over at Winston, curled up in a dog bed in front of their armoire. "It was definitely a surprise."

There's an echo of caution in his voice, like he still thinks Hannibal might take this from him just because it's a reminder of their old lives. Hannibal tightens his arms around his waist. "You deserve to have things which make you happy, my dear. I can only apologize it took me so long to do this for you."

Will hums vaguely, and then says, "We're not killing Molly like we killed Bedelia. We're not killing her at all."

Privately, Hannibal thinks it's a bit unfair that Will got to dismember and consume _his_ ex-wife, but he doesn't get to return the favor. Nevertheless, he supposes all marriages include compromise. "Of course," he agrees out loud. "I've no doubt she established contingencies, were she to disappear, and I have no desire to relocate. Not so soon after we have begun to make a home here."

"I'm surprised you put her in the guest house." Will turns in Hannibal's arms so he can meet his eyes, amused. "I would've guessed you'd put her next door, so she could hear you fuck me."

"I would never be so crass," Hannibal lies.

Will doesn't look like he believes him _at all_ , which Hannibal supposes isn't entirely unfair. He takes Will's hand in his, and presses a kiss to the metal band around his third finger. "It is enough for her to see you wearing my ring. For her to see you in my house." He slides his hand up to Will's jaw, rough with stubble, and pulls him in for a brief, hungry kiss. "For her to know that, for as long as you shall live, you will only ever go to bed with me."

"Hannibal," Will says, "I'm not having sex with my dog in the room." And then he puts the dog in the hallway and closes the door and comes back, wanting, into Hannibal's open arms.

***

It wasn't always so easy. For the first few months of their exile, Will was a creature composed entirely of guilt, a miserable shadow of a man who haunted the house and took potshots at poachers and disappeared for days on end, limping home covered in bruises and cuts the origin of which Hannibal could not determine.

Out of the two of them, it took Will less time to adapt to the continent. He was less used to luxury, to begin with, and Hannibal's years of incarceration have not made him any less fond of fine wines and rich fabrics, things which were easier to come by in BSHCI than they are in Nairobi. The grocery stores are less than adequate. Hannibal had to establish a relationship with a restaurant supplier in order to acquire the necessary ingredients to sustain his culinary lifestyle, and it's only because they also supply such illegal things as lion steaks that he doesn't worry they're an avenue through which Jack Crawford might catch him. He still sometimes finds himself bothered by the heat, but Will, who he always thought preferred snow and forests, seems no more aware of the punishing sun than he had been the freezing cold of a Maryland winter.

The previous owners of their house had made a meager living tagging animals in the preserve. It took Hannibal longer than he's proud of to think to put one of the tags in Will's car, so he could follow him from a distance on one of his disappearing days, but when he finally got around to it, he tracked Will to Kibera, the slums, and a place that the locals called _kupambana nyumba_. Hannibal was not quite fluent in Swahili, but he knew enough to know that phrase translated, roughly, to "fighting house."

Will was a vision, covered in another man's blood, low and feral in the center of a roaring crowd. Hannibal lurked at the back of the tarp tent. Fire and harsh blue light from bare bulbs turned men to specters, the slum into hell, Will into a vengeful, inhuman creature.

Hannibal was so wrapped up in the beauty of it that he hardly thought to wonder _why_ until the fight was over. It was unlike Will, to seek out violence without deliberate purpose. But then, on his way to the shanty hut where the fighters recovered, he remembered the bruises, and how he'd caught Will once, sitting with one of the rifles that they kept for the lions, the barrel very nearly tilted to point at his face. He'd claimed to have been cleaning it, but the cleaning kit was still tucked away neatly in the cabinet.

Will didn't fly into a rage when he discovered Hannibal had followed him. He only sat on the gurney that served as the hut's recovery bed, and looked exhausted.

Hannibal tended to him without a word, crouching on the packed dirt floor. He sealed the gash on Will's cheek with butterfly bandages, taped his mottled black ribs, dabbed antiseptic over his split knuckles. And then he put his hand on Will's face, watching how his eyelids fluttered and closed, and said, "There is no need to do penance, my dear. We are not monsters."

Will laughed bitterly. "Really, Hannibal? _In what world_ are we not monsters?"

Three days before they'd taken a trip across the border into Burundi, where there was enough social unrest to mask even the most high-profile disappearance. They'd killed a man who the news wires called a warlord, who'd abducted nine girls from their school and kept them chained in his house.

"A lion is a monster," Hannibal answered reasonably. "It kills everything in its power. It does not choose. You and I, we are men, and we make our selections with great care."

Will stared at him for a long minute in the light of a kerosene lamp. Hannibal could see there was something he needed desperately, and though he wasn't sure precisely what it was, he held Will's gaze, hoping that was enough to give it to him. In the end, it must have been, because Will looked down at his hands--bloody, clasped loosely in Hannibal's own--and said, "I don't feel guilty anymore, but I know I should."

"Oh, my dear," Hannibal pressed a kiss to his raw, tender knuckles. "Why should you? No one is left to judge us."

The first night they slept together, Will made a hurt noise when Hannibal pulled him into a hug, clinging to him like he might disappear at any moment, and Hannibal was helpless to do anything but take him to bed, move slow and easy against him, shelter the vulnerable bundle of his naked body and hold his face between his hands and confess, over and over again, how dearly he loved him.

Hannibal woke some hours later and realized two things out of order: first, that he'd forgotten to close the patio door, and second, that there was a lioness at the foot of the bed. She stared at him, eyes shining in the dark, and he stared back. There was a rifle beside the bed, but he could never get to it in time. He didn't even know if it was loaded. Will's face was pressed into his bare chest. He felt the muggy heat of Will's breath on his skin, the feather-like tickle of Will's curls on the soft skin uner his arm, the weight of his body taking up space in bed next to him. Not for the first time, the fragility of life struck him like a club.

The lioness turned and left, silent as she came. In the morning, Hannibal asked Will to marry him.

***

He remembers, now, laying in their bed with Will's ex-wife sleeping a few hundred feet away, how he had held a knife to his own throat and told Will, through the haze of his illness, _Some people say that it is important to die in holy places. For my part, I believe it is more vital to die by holy hands._

Though Hannibal didn't know without a shadow of a doubt that Will could not kill him, he had trusted. And he wanted Will to free him from the purgatory of being neither forgiven nor fully damned; in the gnawing heat of fever, he was aware enough to want to know for sure, one way or another--in case those hellish half-remembered days were to be his last--whether the man he loved held him in the same regard.

Now, he runs his hands over the sleep-soft lines of his husband's body, his skin still damp with sweat from their lovemaking, thinking of the ease of their last kill, and has no doubts.

***

In the morning, after an exquisite breakfast, Will takes Molly out in one of the Jeeps, looking for lions. They each have a rifle loaded with big game cartridges. Logically she thinks it still isn't quite enough protection against the world's most dangerous predator, but she isn't afraid. She isn't afraid of much, these days.

Between scanning the savanna grass for signs of life, she watches Will. The air whipping through the open sides of the Jeep tugs at his curls, tossing them around his face, and she thinks this place suits him in a place that their home never quite did. Whenever he left the house, she used to imagine she could see him shoring himself up, getting ready to pretend for everyone out in the world. She never thought he was pretending when they were alone together, but now she thinks maybe he was. Maybe there were different layers of it. Maybe on some level he was even pretending for himself.

She's going to miss Winston, but he was Will's before he was theirs, and anyway she thinks he needs him more. When she first met him and his seven dogs, she thought he liked them for the same reason she did--because he'd grown up with parents who weren't affectionate enough and enjoyed the unconditional love. But she thinks now that maybe he needed them for something deeper than that. Total acceptance, maybe--the kind that only his new husband can give him. Either way, she knows Winston will live a long life, and die happy.

"Hey," Will says from the driver's seat, "look, Moll. There."

The Jeep comes to a stop. Molly stands up on her seat, bringing her binoculars up to get a good look at them. There are two of them, tearing into the carcass of an antelope under the wide branches of an acacia. She smiles in that wide, easy way people smile when they can't help it, and when Will asks if she wants him to try and move the Jeep closer, get a closer look, she says, "No, no. I'm fine from here. Holy cow. _Lions_."

“Yeah,” Will agrees, and she can hear the laughter in his voice. “Lions."

**Author's Note:**

> “It is important to die in holy places.” ~Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient


End file.
